How do you partner with the various marketing teams to ensure a successful product launch?

PMM is hard (and awesome) because we are a hub, not a spoke that often controls the final outputs. We’re not growth marketers, or demand gen manager, or brand marketers. However we do influence, inform, manifest, and/or articulate growth strategies and campaigns. Product marketing needs other growth teams to commit and execute. Same goes for traditional demand gen and campaigns – we have a bit more influence there and ability to define demand programs and contribute content, but still heavy reli ...Read More

My biggest piece of advice here is to loop as many folks in as possible, as early as possible, and to keep a close tracker on when/who was involved in those conversations. A product launch requires many parts of the marketing team to deliver a great moment at the time of launch, and to maximize impact post-launch. Some key functions to consider + timing: Comms/PR: These teams will need time to partner with you on launch comms assets, such as an announcement blog or press release, and also to pot ...Read More

When working with the broader marketing team, I establish alignment early and check in frequently. Collaboration begins during planning cycles, where we align on goals, finalize marketing themes, identify key market moments, and share details about priority launches. When managing a specific launch, I follow a framework that emphasizes early alignment and buy-in, fosters effective collaboration, and sets clear goals while measuring progress. What I appreciate about the framework below is its fle ...Read More

The best approach when pulling together a cross-functional team for a product launch, either cross-marketing, cross-company, or both, is to have a solid launch plan with defined deliverables and assignees for each task. Big launches that need cross-team coordination benefit from having a project manager and/or project management tools like Asana, Monday, etc. Of course spreadsheets work too! It's always best to identify the deliverables and tasks ahead of time and get alignment on which team own ...Read More

Different teams might own different channels. I tend to think that I know enough that I could probably write a good email or create a good social strategy for a launch, but im not an expert in those areas--and we have people in parallel marketing teams who are experts there. So for my launches, we have weekly XFN GTM syncs where those stakeholders are included and we walk through where we are for launch and look for status updates on key deliverables like emails, data sheets, help center article ...Read More

Understand that everything they plan is based on their cross-company relationships and develop your own cross-disciplinary relationships - not just with Marketing.  Develop long-term relationships and maintain regular and continuous communications with all stakeholders.  Do the same with senior leadership across the organization.  Know the team leads; know their challenges; know their plans and programs.  Remember that they have more than just product launch on their plates - make sure you're th ...Read More